Page 3 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Content lied.

Patterns were way more useful. Every organization had a rhythm. Orlov systems were no different. Brutish in places, elegant in others. Lots of layers. Lots of redundancy. Whoever built their financial routes had a decent head for misdirection, but a bad habit of overcomplicating simple things, which told me there were probably several people involved and at least one of them loved feeling smarter than everyone else in the room.

Ego left doors open.

I was comparing two routing logs from separate shell entities when something flickered across the secondary monitor. Not in the dramatic movie-hacker way where a red skull popped up and a countdown started. Real anomalies were quieter. Sometimes they looked like a fraction out of place or a shadow where there shouldn’t be one, or even a pressure change in a room you thought was empty.

One hash didn’t match.

I sat very still. The apartment seemed to still with me, like even the pipes had decided to shut up and watch. I placed my mug down slowly. Then I backed out of the active view and pulled the raw log into an isolated window.

There it was. A touch so light I almost missed it. Almost.

Someone had passed through one of the same outer layers I had been monitoring. It wasn’t the Orlov internal security team; their signatures were sloppier, heavier, almost like boots through fresh snow. It wasn’t one of the offshore administrators either. I had catalogued them all by now—the bored one in Cyprus, the careful one in Warsaw, the idiot in Miami who logged into restricted accounts from hotel Wi-Fi like Darwin had personally abandoned him.

This wasn’t them. It wasn’t me either, which was the part that made my fingers go cold.

I checked the timestamp. Then the route. Then I checked all of it again because panic was just incompetence with adrenaline, and I didn’t have time for either.

Whoever was there was almostinvisible.

The signature was barely a signature at all, more like an absence shaped by intention. Whoever had been there knew how to move without disturbing the surface. There wasn’t any clumsy privilege escalation. No noisy scan or use of brute force or obvious exfiltration. Just a brief, delicate pressure at the edge of the system, a look through a cracked door, and then nothing.

My first thought was Mikhail. Not him personally, of course. Men like that didn’t type their own threats. But his people, his technical arm, the quiet analysts behind the violence. Maybe they had finally seen me. Maybe one of my passive watchers had brushed a wire it shouldn’t have. Maybe the thing I had been circling had turned its head, and now the monster knew my name.

A cold rush moved through me so fast that for one second, my body felt frozen.

I didn’t move.

I took a deep breath and listened to the stillness of my apartment. The hum of the refrigerator. The faint tick of the radiator. The distant whisper of tires over wet pavement four floors below. My own breathing, steady because I made it steady.

Fear was allowed in the room. It just didn’t get a vote.

I lifted my hands back to the keyboard and started checking my perimeter. First, I checked my own machines. I pulled the last twelve hours of router logs, then the last forty-eight. My honeypot network was untouched except for the usual bot garbage and one neighbor’s printer still trying to make friends. Cameras showed nothing but hallway darkness, the stairwell landing, and a spider having what appeared to be a deeply fulfilling evening in the corner near the ceiling.

Door sensor intact.

Window sensor intact.

No thermal blips from the fire escape.

No Bluetooth devices lingering nearby except the usual building trash—three TVs, two speakers, someone’s fitness tracker, and one extremely judgmental smart scale that broadcast more than its owner probably knew.

My apartment was clean.

For the moment…

I exhaled slowly through my nose. Then I turned back to the anomaly. The smart thing would have been to cut everything. Shut down, wipe the session, go dark for forty-eight hours, andlet the Orlov network settle back into its own ugly rhythm while I reassessed from a distance.

That would have been the smart thing to do.

It was also exactly what a guilty intruder did when they knew they had been seen.

So I didn’t go dark. I stayed right where I was.

I kept my systems running at the same cadence. I left the visible processes untouched. I let my passive monitoring continue like nothing had happened, because if someone was watching my reaction, I wanted them to see a woman who hadn’t noticed a damn thing.

Meanwhile, I started building a cage for the anomaly.